The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
In forwarding packets, a packet switching device often uses binary and ternary content-addressable memories to perform lookup operations for determining how to process a packet. These parallel search operations on entries in a content-addressable memory generate significant amount of heat.